A politics of pure entertainment

Paul Westermeyer

Tuesday

Nov 22, 2016 at 11:34 AM

At the 2001 edition of the Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science did what it does best; having been previously, unfairly parsimonious with accolades for two of the greatest films of all time, voting members issued a retroactive mea culpa in the form of a Best Picture award to Ridley Scott, director of “Alien” and “Blade Runner,” for his “historical” epic, “Gladiator.”

Magnum opus, “Gladiator” is not — it did not aim for higher art, for weighty symbolic meaning or for anything other than long, snaking queues into popcorn factories around the globe. It was a simple movie, really, about a moribund imperial power, the easy distraction of its denizens and politics as spectacle; it — hmm.

Well. Before I go any further, I’d like to extend sincere congratulations to Scott on a well-deserved win.

It’s easy, of course, to look back at any significant cultural work through a lens of Marxist critique, and scrutinize it as a reflection of the period in which it was produced. And if we do this with “Gladiator,” we might allow ourselves to be awed with Scott’s divination of the future. But before social media, before Citizens United, even before the military adventurism in the Middle East, there were ominous signs in the augury.

The same playwright of populist anti-intellectualism that authored President-elect Donald Trump already had works like Ronald Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt in the folio. Much has been and will be written about Trump, but it’s all destined to be but riffs on a voluminous canon of idiocy that’s long been coursing through America’s veins.

What’s truly unique with Trump, however, is his ability to bark wildly enough to redden the cheeks of an unwashed carnie. And it’s supremely entertaining to many of us in Middle America — we’re the sort who award Facebook likes to big rig pics and macro images with an internal logic that even Lenny of “Of Mice and Men” would find embarrassing.

But there’s no use in trying to punish a toddler by taking away his Tonka trucks and coloring books; rather, if the Democratic Party wants to remain competitive in election cycles, it needs to find fun toys of its own.

Away from the repugnance that the 1.5 million more people who voted for Hillary Clinton feel toward Trump’s installation of white nationalists like Steve Bannon into the upper echelon of our republic, there’s the beginnings of a storm brewing in the DNC, a fight between the centrist New Democrats and the progressive Left about the future and soul of the party.

Decades of a misguided synthesis of right-wing economics and left-wing social policy and a failure to address deepening income inequality across class, race and sex, would suggest that new ideas, such as single-payer healthcare, a much higher minimum wage or even something truly radical like a universal income, are worth looking into.

But our votes haven’t been about better ideas in eons, have they? Marginally left-of-center Dems like erstwhile commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton, and outgoing incumbent, Barack Obama, won 16 years of the presidency not because they promised (let alone delivered upon) drastic, systemic overhaul, but because they relied on the polysemy of words like “change,” and because they are charismatic, unrivaled orators.

There’s a sick animal magnetism to Trump, too — as scuzzy as his personality is, it’s impossible to say he doesn’t have one. This, likely more than anything, is what doomed the Democratic nominee.

We can talk in circles around emails, Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation and whatever other runoff comes from the sanitary sewer, but her personality, a discomfiting pastiche of awkward pop culture references and skin-crawling slogans, felt contrived in a lab.

After undergoing a battery of exams and test screenings — written and attended, of course, by her courtiers and yes-men — a Petri dish politician was cultivated. At least the American people at-large know, more or less, good TV when they see it.

A left-right divide has made people who believe in things more polarized than ever, but a creeping nihilism and a warped empathy has left a growing number of American people with the sensitivity of a phallus doomed to perpetual flaccidity.

Without trillions of dollars to burn in an educational overhaul, and without a consensus on basic tenants of human rights and dignity, the future of political battles appear as though they’ll be fought in much dumber theaters of combat.

So, in 2020, when a Democratic candidate takes up a gladius and runs it through a primary opponent, we’ll know who will enter the Colosseum to fight to the death with our auburn-haired emperor. No need to ask, Maximus — we’ll most definitely be entertained.

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